The dumbest part is like, why? How much work is it really to keep goo.gl links around?
In 2018, Google wanted developers to move to Firebase Dynamic Links that detect the user’s platform and sends them to either the web or an app. Google ended up also shutting down that service for devs.
lmao
How much work is it really to keep goo.gl links around?
A lot.
Goo.gl has a namespace for 10 billion entries, it used to keep tracking/analytics data for each link, with a user interface, and it would happily generate them for links to internal stuff.
Just keeping it running would take some containers of server racks, plus updating the security, accounting for changing web standards, and so on.
Keep in mind this isn’t some self-hosted url shortener with less than a million entries and a peak of 10K users/second, that you can slap onto a random server and keep it going. It’s a multiple orders of magnitude larger beast, requiring a multi-server architecture just to keep the database, plus more of the same for the analytics, admin interface… and users will expect it to return a result in a fraction of a second, worldwide.
They could drop all the tracking though and only serve the public redirects. A much simpler product that would retain web links.
I think they’ve dropped the tracking already. Still, where’s the money in that?
They also can’t release the database, not without prior consent of the link creators, or risking exposing some login credentials some very smart people might’ve put in there.
Why does there have to be money in it when they’re sunsetting the service?
Google/Alphabet is a for-profit corporation, it makes no sense for them to do anything without some sort of profit.
Good analysis, I agree and understand.
That’s a whole lot of link rot about to happen.
I have probably saved hundreds of links from such a fate in my org. People there use them for everything even though the media they’re using them in allows them to be clicked (e.g. they’re not going out to print where someone has to type them in).
Thankfully, I’m in a position to un-shorten them before they get published. lol
It might be interesting to have a search engine or someone else who has built a massive list of links visible online generate unshortened forms now before Google shuts down the service.
Don’t build your online life around Google services.
Don’t rely on any company keeping a service running unless you’ve got a contract with them
Switch to Proton, Linux, Librewolf, Matrix, Gimp and Libreoffice.
I’ve been v curious abt matrix but it’s taken me years to get everyone I care abt on signal 😅
Signal is centralized,
closed-source, not-selfhostable (edit: in any meaningful way) and requires being attached to a phone number. (Edit: server source is available, but self-hosting requires recompiling and distributing a custom app to all of your contacts to actually use it.)Matrix is decentralized, federated, fully open source with multiple client and server implementations, self-hostable, and does not require being attached to a phone number.
Sure, some of those things are accurate (some are accurate-ish). However, there is way more metadata with Matrix than Signal.
To be clear, I use both, but Matrix’ metadata problem bothers me.
Where the metadata goes I think is important as well.
All Signal metadata necessarily goes through Signal’s servers and is tied to your phone number, but not all Matrix metadata ever gets near the Matrix.org if you are using a different homeserver.
I think both are less than ideal in that regard, and I think Briar (strictly P2P) has a much better model for dealing with this at the expense of generally being a UX disaster.
Signal is fine for instant messaging.
Matrix is closer to Discord.
GoogLOL
Why anyone uses a single Google product, I’ll never know.
Disclaimer: I don’t use any google services myself.
Because it is free, guaranteed to work as long as they keep it running and marketed well.
Plus since they were early into the game of tech online they have many services that all link together.
There aren’t many that will offer most users so much value for ‘free’.
Most alternatives will have some cost if you want as much space as google provides, either the same as google (user data) or monetary (which I semi agree with, hosting isn’t free and I’d rather pay money than with data). However, not everyone is in a position to pay with money and so data is usually what they pay with.
